Date: 9/24/98 5:25:31 PM From: AOL News Man Continues Nessie Search .c The Associated Press By BRUCE SMITH HARDEEVILLE, S.C. (AP) -- Dan Taylor gets a wee bit perturbed when people suggest he's obsessed with the Loch Ness monster. To be sure, he spends most days in a sweltering warehouse building a four-man submarine to take to Scotland in search of the creature that supposedly lurks in the lake. He estimates he will sink $1 million into the project by the time he is done. But obsession has nothing to do with it, Taylor says. At 58, he simply wants to finish a job he started almost 30 years ago. ``I was given the job to find Nessie and I failed,'' Taylor says. ``I'm going back and fix it.'' Nessie sightings go back centuries, but it was 1969 when Taylor operated a home-built, one-man yellow submarine during a monster-hunting expedition sponsored by World Book Encyclopedia. There were rumors the Beatles would stop by to get a look at, if not Nessie, at least the yellow submarine (which was yellow so that it would be visible to other vessels, not in tribute to the Beatles tune). Neither musicians nor monster showed. ``Nessie is pretty elusive,'' Taylor says. ``I thought I got her. Something was laying on the bottom and the wash from it threw my submarine way off course.'' Now, Taylor hopes to return to the lake next year. He is building a bigger, faster yellow submarine, dubbed Nessa after the Gallic goddess who gave her name to both the lake and the monster. It will be mounted with a harpoon-like device to poke the creature and get a genetic sample. After the 1969 expedition, Taylor, who learned about submarines as a crewman in the Navy and about building them at Georgia Tech, busied himself with a career that included working in the restaurant business, operating his own telephone company and buying a dam with the idea of generating electricity to sell. A heart attack about five years ago ``just woke me up,'' and now he spends his days laboring over the 30-ton fiberglass-and-steel submarine. The sub, built with proceeds from the sale of a house and, Taylor hopes, donations, will be propelled by a 500-horsepower DC locomotive motor powered by dozens of automotive batteries. It will be capable of cruising at 20 knots, or 23 mph, to keep up with Nessie. Taylor clocked what he believes was Nessie at 14 knots in 1969. Some say Nessie is a dinosaur; others say it is only a myth. Taylor thinks it is some type of eel that by some quirk of nature kept right on growing. But he confesses: ``I don't think people like the eel theory because they're slimy. A dinosaur has more romance to it.'' AP-NY-09-24-98 1322EDT Copyright 1998 The Associated Press.